We drank coffee while the birthday boy, feeling very mature at age eight, opened his presents. He got a couple science kits and a movie. Then Carter ran out of the room and returned with his bag of peacock marbles. He had purchased them yesterday at the zoo with his own money. They were shiny with swirls of blue and green. “Happy Birthday Cody!” he said and thrust the marbles into Cody’s hands.

We are out of town visiting relatives in the warmth and sunshine of Arizona. As it happens, just like the year before and the one before that, Cody’s birthday falls during our spring break and coincides with our trip to Tucson.

I started to retell the story of Cody’s day of birth. He was born three months early and came into the world weighting just over two pounds. He was very small but his story is very big. When I got to the part of the story where I told of the incubator in which he lived for two months, his eyes became wet with unshed tears. “There were strange blue things floating everywhere, momma.”

I read somewhere that children cannot remember details or events from their very early childhood, that the brain chemistry changes and those memories are not able to be retained. I do not know if what he remembers is real or not, but who am I to take those away. And so I simply nodded and told him that there were a lot of strange things floating around during that time.

I wrote about his birth here. I find myself gravitating back to that post several times a year. Give it a read if you wish.

We taught our three children sign, beginning at eight months. They were signing back by ten months. My oldest, who knew over 100 signs, has the youngest memories. She’ll tell me memories, shockingly accurate, of things that happened to her before she was a year old. She’s 11 now. When she recalls them, she tells it in both lsmguages, using the sign first and then adding speech around it. Watching this, I’ve come to the conclusion the memories are there, in our brains, but unless we have a way to pull it up, and translate it, we can’t access it or share it. She can pull those early memories out because she has a way to find them and a common language to describe them. Who’s to say what your son knows and remembers.